‘I’d make a tiger,’ Han said.
Senkovi was speechless for a long time, enough that his console began lighting up with frustrated red error messages as his fellow game player got annoyed with his inaction. ‘Huh,’ he managed eventually.
Han grinned down at him – it was the first time he had ever seen her smile, perhaps. He suddenly found his opinion of her completely revised. She wanted to recreate a tiger, here on the Aegean, where the narrow corridors and enclosed workspaces would lead to an interesting work-life balance for the humans having to share the ship with a large carnivore. And, of course, she’d never go ahead and actually do it. Senkovi was frankly the only person on the ship who would just live the dream and to hell with the opinions or even permissions of others. But the thought was there and Senkovi decided he liked Han a lot better for it.
‘I had a tiger when I was a kid,’ she said candidly, and he wondered if that meant a stuffed toy, or if she came from an income bracket considerably above even his own rather privileged one. ‘But you, you’ve got a whole load of these . . . octopi. And no tigers.’
‘Ah well, the key failing with tigers is that their performance drops off sharply when you get them to mend coolant pipes a kilometre below the surface of the ocean.’
Han stared at him for long enough to make him uncomfortable, then the grin was back. ‘That’s not what this is about,’ she pointed out.
Senkovi thought about keeping up the presence but decided she was too sharp for it. ‘Oh, well, it is. I mean, that’s the end goal. But I had an octopus when I was a kid.’ Rather more than one, but the narrative was simpler that way. Then his console beeped sharply at him and he hurriedly made a move to keep it quiet.
Too late, though, for Han was crouching down beside him. ‘Who are you playing against? Is that Poullister? He can’t play worth a damn.’ The console was displaying a tile-laying game, a little idealized landscape half-constructed from squares, linking roads, rivers, cities. And it was a mess, pieces all over, roads spiralling to nowhere, the spiky walls of towns clustering like sea urchins.
‘It’s . . . Not Poullister, no.’
Han’s eyes were following where the cables from the console led. And yes, he could have just run the whole thing in virtual space on the Aegean’s system, and that was the logical next step. Right now he was trying to keep his games private, because the others would mock.
Han wasn’t mocking, though. He could see the wheels of her mind turning. ‘You’re . . .’
‘Paul,’ Senkovi explained. ‘Well, Paul 5. He’s the most successfully modified. He likes the console and experiencing virtual space. I’d thought . . . well, there are humans who never really take to a virtuality, but the octopi are all about manipulating space. There’s no tactile element for them yet, and I thought that would be the sticking point, but they get it very quickly, Paul 5 especially. So I’m trying some simple games. With debatable success. He makes moves, and he’s understood the limits the game places on when he can move and what moves can be made, but as far as strategy or points or winning, that seems to be outside his range at the moment.’
‘Tell him he doesn’t get fed if he loses,’ Han suggested, staring into the tank.
Senkovi had tried that. Pavlovian motivation wasn’t terribly useful for training an octopus. Once they were fed, food became a lesser motivator than curiosity. Also, when Senkovi had contrived to communicate that the game hid a shrimp inside it somehow, Paul 2 had broken the game trying to take it apart.
‘We’re going to need this space back for payload sooner rather than later,’ Han remarked eventually, even somewhat regretfully.
‘Firstly, this is payload, albeit highly experimental. Secondly, we don’t. Look, I’ve reorganized. We can get by on the other bays. I’ve even gained us some space.’ He sent over his changes, which were in fact just as advertised, to the virtual space their mind’s eyes shared. The designers of the Aegean had been slacking somewhat, leaning on their large budget. Senkovi had improved on their work to provide the ship with improved economy of space and movement of matériel, the sort of thing that someone might have achieved genuine commendations for. The entire elaborate operation looked good on paper to anyone who didn’t suspect he’d gone through it solely because he wanted more space for fishtanks.
After Han had gone, he finished the game and fed his pets, hoping that the rest of the ship wasn’t already tittering behind his back about crazy Senkovi and his performing molluscs. The console was already flashing, though, despite Paul being busy dismantling a crab.
It was one of the others, Salome. She had been watching Paul, and now she had used her own newly implanted connection to break into the game system. She had moved as much as she could but now needed him to take his own turn before she could continue playing.
Senkovi suspected he should probably get away from the tanks and go have human contact or something healthy like that. On the other hand, he’d just had an actual conversation, which was quite wearying, and he could hardly disappoint such a keen experimental subject.
He sat down again, dropping a tile into the virtual space and waiting to see what Salome would do.
5.
Siri Skai would be in charge of the orbiting module in Baltiel’s absence. She and four others would have relatively little to do except continue to round off the rough edges of the database the computer was assembling on the Nod biosphere (Senkovi’s joke name having gradually infiltrated the collective consciousness). Of course, technically Baltiel himself should be staying up top and delegating the ground party, but he was damned if he was going to. This was the day he had been waiting for, in and out of sleep over the years since their arrival here. He would not only be on the shuttle down, he would be the first damned human being to set foot on this world. Nobody was taking that from him.
Remotes had been down there for a long time now, setting things up. There was a habitat ready to receive them, filled with an atmosphere not vastly different to that outside – a little lower pressure, a little more oxygen. An Earth-ish atmosphere, though, and the gravity would be real, even if a little stronger than they were used to. He had been living in space, sometimes in rotational gravity, sometimes in none, for too long.
Of course, the plan was purely to run a research mission – the research mission he had invented to replace what they were actually supposed to be up to out on Nod. He shouldn’t be thinking about the place as ‘home’. It would be a poky little series of interconnected domes, barely more personal space than on the module they’d separated from the Aegean and left in orbit when the rest of the ship went off on the road to Damascus.
Senkovi and his damn fool names. But they always seemed to stick. No doubt the colonists would have their own sanitized monikers for both planets when they arrived. Or maybe not. That depended on just how badly things actually went back home. Senkovi said they’d get boatloads of desperate refugees turning up at every terraforming station, clamouring to be housed and fed. The great human diaspora, but not how anyone had envisaged it.
Baltiel had sat down to a meal with all his crew, not long ago – he’d tweaked the rotas especially so that everyone would be awake and ready for the historic launch. The mood had been cautiously optimistic. Earth was very far away, after all, and everyone was sure that things there would sort themselves out. The mysteries of Nod were far more immediate for them.
Skai had even wondered about harvesting something edible from the planet, because Senkovi was a long way from commercial fisheries over on Damascus. Skai was a geologist, though, and tended not to read the monograms of other specialities. Ninety per cent of Nod proteins were indigestible to humans – not immediately poisonous but just inert stuff that would clog up your gut and probably kill you eventually from the levels of arsenic and mercury the planet seemed to thrive on. The remaining ten per cent were not economical to separate out.